I am currently in the middle of my typhoid vaccine.  I’m sure you really needed to know that — just chalk it up to my tendency to share ridiculous things with people who don’t need to know them.

A week ago Thursday, I made my rare appointment with the travel clinician on campus.  We’ve had one for ages, but it’s only been recently that they’ve started allowing employees (as opposed to students) to use their services.  Apparently it finally dawned on someone that having staff take hours and hours of personal time to go get allergy and travel immunizations was more costly than allowing them to walk to a convenient office in the middle of campus.

The office is clearly set up for students who don’t have “normal” doctors.  I don’t have this issue; the issue that I have with going to my “normal” doctor is that she exists within a system where the travel clinic is in a different location.  I don’t mean to stereotype, because their travel person is excellent, but the office attracts a clientele of a nature where you wouldn’t be surprised if someone came in to the waiting room with a stab wound — most likely with the knife still in.

They’re pretty thorough at this clinic.  And I mean thorough.  The intake form not only asked about my sexual preference, but about specific numbers (not only aggregate but per-session), whether or not I recently or am currently experiencing a yeast infection (the labeling made it clear that men don’t get a pass on that one), and whether anyone in my family had ever contracted rabies, the bubonic plague, or the hantavirus.

All I needed was a new yellow fever shot and an update on my typhoid vaccine, as both were out of date. Yellow fever is a minor issue in Brazil, and I’m going to be in an area where it’s endemic for all of 3 days, but it’s also one of those shots where other countries (i.e., Egypt) may want to see proof of vaccination within the next year, so I was going on a better safe than sorry basis.

I’m pretty religious about the typhoid vaccine — when I was a student in Egypt, one of my fellow Americans contracted the disease from something she ate.  (The punchline was that she thought she had a cold and continued coming to class, coughing and hacking all over everyone.)  Since I’m not terribly vigilant about things that I eat in Egypt — or, more specifically, I am frequently taken to places by others who aren’t– I just keep the vaccine up to date.  I fondly remember the time that Samer took us to a restaurant in a neighborhood unknown to most Cairenes where I’m pretty sure that the flock of sheep that was herded by our table at one point in the evening was what wound up on our plates later in the evening.

Anyway, back to the doctor.  Six forms later, I was taken to see the travel nurse, a fast talking Australian.

“I’m here to get–”
“Let’s start at the top of this form,” she said, handing me a blue folder roughly the size of a phone book.

And go through it we did, line by line.  At the end of the session, we had a list of inoculations about $700 long that I just didn’t think I needed.  I know that medical science controls these things, but there was just a limit on how many weakened viruses I wanted in my system at one time.  We were seriously looking at yellow fever, typhoid, hepatitis B, regular flu, H1N1, and a Pertussis/Diptheria/Tetanus booster — and this was after we decided that encephalitis and meningitis were just too much.

“Are the flu shot and H1N1 really necessary?” I asked.
“You don’t have to get them,” she said, before rattling off how many zillions of people die every year of influenza.
“It’s not even flu season,” I said.  “I’ll just wait for the combined shot to come out next year.”  I might be wrong — it’s winter in Brazil.  Is that flu season down there?

I managed to further demure on the TDaP booster since I’m fairly sure I’ve had one in the past decade.  When they told me to bring my immunization records, I thought they meant my tropical immunization records.  I didn’t know I was going to be asked to account for every immunization I’ve ever gotten since infancy.

I left with two bandaids in my arm — my yellow fever injection and the yellow certificate that goes with it, and a Hepatitis B injection, the first of a series of three that sting like a bitch — and a prescription for the oral typhoid vaccine which is fun to show people because it says, “LIVE TYPHOID VIRUS” right on the box.  I’m keeping it in the fridge at work just to freak people out because it has to be taken between breakfast and lunch.

The good news is that I’m good to go for several years … right after I finish my Hep B series.  And man, those things hurt worse than a tetanus shot.  Maybe this time I’ll pick up one of those burnt orange lollipops in the waiting room on the way out…